The present disclosure relates generally to electronic messaging, and more specifically to identifying and managing information about related electronic messages.
Electronic messaging, or electronic message communication, generally refers to the communication of electronic messages from a sender to one or more recipients via a computing system. One widely used form of electronic message communication includes email. “A message” as used herein broadly refers to an electronic message (e.g., an email message) communicated via an electronic messaging system. Applications or client devices can communicate and access messages using a message service provider via a protocol such as a post office protocol (POP) or an Internet message access protocol (IMAP). Message service providers can include, for example, Google Mail®, Yahoo Mail®, Hotmail®, or other mail services. Messages, such as an email message, can include a header that can identify the message and that can identify other related messages. For example, a header in an email message can include a message identifier (“message ID”) that represents a unique string which identifies the email message in a messaging system. The header can include a reply field (e.g., an “in-reply-to” field) that identifies a message ID of a predecessor (parent) email message that an email message including the message ID is in response, or reply to. A references field in the header can identify one or more message IDs for messages that are predecessors of a message.
Communication by email and other forms of electronic messaging has grown beyond a tool for corresponding to others to a tool for organizing and managing people's lives and businesses. Many people rely on messaging as a way to manage tasks. But as a seemingly ever-increasing amount of content is communicated over email, users struggle to manage the volume of messages that are received every day. Message services and client devices are also faced with the task of managing computing resources and access to the volume of messages. The increase in volume of messages challenges message service providers to find new ways to identify and associate messages into groups or threads to improve access and management of the messages. Client devices with reduced computing resources can be susceptible to machine crashes and unavailable, or limited computing resources to identify and store thread information.